In an era of sound bytes, television attack ads, political blogs, and twenty-four hour national news cycles, it can be difficult to imagine that politics once was different. For one, it was more local. In the Nineteenth Century, and through a good part of the Twentieth Century, Democrats and Republicans concentrated their efforts in the crowded wards and precincts of America's cities. Before radio, television, and the Internet, communication was largely face-to-face. Without automobiles and metropolitan mass transit systems, the average individual's life was more intensely local. People walked to work. They shopped in their neighborhoods. They socialized with others in their building, or on their block. The world in which one lived was the world that one saw every day with one's own eyes. Knowledge came from the lips of men and women with whom one was intimately acquainted. They were the people with whom Americans worked and played, argued and played; fought or loved. For millions, the city was the world. Thus, it was by necessity that the political parties applied the bulk of their energies in places like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore. And it was a different kind of politics, a machine not unlike the new and wondrous devices that these same urban dwellers saw each day in the factories in which they worked. These were the factories that were making America great; that were making her a worldwide center of wealth, and a worldwide center of population. Ambitious men managed the factories that contained the machines. They were the bosses. Equally ambitious men managed the political machines that ran the cities that contained the factories. They were bosses, too. The boss system they created would outlast by decades the early industrial machines. The boss system would shape America's urban politics for generations; leaving as its ultimate legacy the nation we know today.
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